Apple has for years been a premium brand that rarely, if ever, discounted products. Period.

Every year the company could raise prices on products, and consumers not only would happily pay, but stand in long lines for the privilege of doing so.

So, when Apple started putting misleading, but seemingly consumer-friendly posters, in front of Apple Stores at the end of 2018 offering a new iPhone model for $300 off (with trade-in of your current phone), you know something different happened for the company this year.

Consumers fought back.

Many analysts have reported that in the wake of poorer-than-expected sales for this year's crop of iPhones, Apple cut back on production, including on the $1,100 iPhone XS Max, the $999 iPhone XS and the XR, the "budget" model that replaced the previous entry-level new phone, the $349 SE. The price for the XR (the one Apple is hawking discounts for): $749.

Poster for discounts on Apple's iPhone XR(Photo: Jefferson Graham)

"This should be a wake-up call for Apple," says Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. "They swung, and they really missed."

The prices on the new phones are "far too high," says Terry Walton, a tourist from Auckland, New Zealand. He has an iPhone 7 and didn't even consider any of the X-series iPhones because it still works just fine. Upgrading "didn't enter my mind at all," he says.

(Walton's daughter, Olivia, thought of moving on from her old iPhone 6S, but dad didn't agree. "With the new update, it's failing a bit, but that's fine," she says.)

The iPhones got the most attention, because it's the premier product for a company that gets 65 percent of its revenue from the devices. The XS Max model is the most expensive iPhone ever.

Unlike past years, however, Apple didn't offer consumers much that was new for the 2018 models. The flagship XS and XS Max phones had more power, but that didn't resonate with consumers who thought their old iPhone 6S and 7 devices ran just fine. The XR has the premium edge-to-edge display of the X series iPhones, minus the second camera lens of those models and shinier OLED screen, but it's $400 more expensive than the older, entry-level current model.

But don't cry for Apple. It will still sell more than 200 million iPhones this year. It's just that analysts such as Ives expected Apple to sell as many as 220 million phones. "We reduced it to 210 million and now think it could go even lower, to 205 million," he says.

The rest of Apple's lineup was mixed. Sales of the HomePod, Apple's pricey, $349 connected-speaker answer to the Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers those companies were practically giving away in holiday sales for $25 to $50, fizzled. A new, lower-priced $329 iPad did do well, according to Stephen Baker, an analyst with the NPD Group. "This iPad will have its best holiday in years," he says.

Apple said in October that it won't reveal sales numbers for iPhones any longer, so analysts will just have to take their best guesses in 2019.

Let's remember that Apple still makes great phones. The new models were the best of the breed. It's not the lack of new features so much as that older iPhones are so good, many people don't feel the need to upgrade. Not for $1,000 and up, anyway.

"If I could see a huge difference in a new phone, then maybe I'd be more prone for it, but $1,000 for one or two new features ... I knew I wasn't getting it," said Keith Skinner, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

And I wonder if there's any new feature consumers really would care about more than an all-day battery, unbreakable screen and camera as good as Google's Pixel 3 for shooting in low light.

Apple historically redesigns iPhones every other year (2018 was the "S" year, when models get slight upgrades) so in September we could see the company go back to the drawing board and really wow us again.

Or not. But, here's hoping!

(Photo: Apple)

In other tech news this week

People apparently bought Fitbits and a whole lot of Google Home and Amazon Echo speakers for the holidays, as evidenced by a look at the app store charts. The Alexa app took the top spot on both the iOS and Google app stores' lists of the top free apps the day after Christmas while Fitbit was in the No. 5 slot. Google Home took the No. 3 spot in the Android Play Store and came in seventh on the iPhone. Among other popular apps on both stores: the Tile app, for the popular tracker, was 20 on iPhone and 47 on Android; iRobot Home, for controlling the robotic Roomba vacuums, was 40 on iPhone and 91 on Android; and the Ring app, for the video doorbell, was 41 on iPhone and 65 on Android.

Despite the hacking, theft of personal data, frequent apologies from the social network and terrible grades for 2018 from the press, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg says he's "proud" of the year the social network has had. "Building community and bringing people together leads to a lot of good, and I'm committed to continuing our progress in these areas as well," he wrote on his Facebook page.

Did your Instagram look different Thursday? You weren't alone. An Instagram test that changed the way users go through their feeds went wide across the social network. And the internet was not happy with the potential new changes. The apparent update, which appeared to be in the process of rolling out to users, changed the way people viewed feeds. As opposed to the normal method of scrolling down vertically through posts from the people you follow, under the test format users needed to swipe and tap through it, similar to how you navigate the company's Stories feature. By the end of the day, Instagram scrapped the new look.

And that's our last Talking Tech newsletter for 2018. Don't forget to tell your friends to subscribe at http://technewsletter.usatoday.com. We'll be back at you next weekend with a sneak peek at the Consumer Electronics Show, which launches Jan. 6 with press previews. In the meantime, please listen to the daily #TalkingTech podcast and follow me (@jeffersongraham) on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

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